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It’s not just abt future it’s abt here/now 2 —Lauren Halsey Based in South Central Los Angeles, where her family has lived for generations, Lauren Halsey creates immersive installations that bridge sculpture and architecture, and graphically maximalist collages that blend real and imagined geographies. She recontextualizes and reinterprets local vernacular sources such as flyers, murals, signs, and tags—icons of pride, autonomy, initiative, and resilience. Both celebrating Black cultural expressions and archiving them, Halsey’s work offers a form of creative resistance to the forces of gentrification. In addition to the signs and symbols of contemporary South Central, the artist employs the iconography of ancient Egypt as a means of reclaiming lost legacies. She is also inspired by the Afrofuturist aesthetics of funk music and the utopian architecture proposed in the 1960s by Archigram and Superstudio. Born in Los Angeles in 1987, Halsey earned a BFA from California Institute of the Arts and an MFA from Yale University in 2014. In 2018, she presented we still here, there at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. A cavernous installation of cement illuminated in many bright and iridescent colored surfaces, it was filled with figurines, objects, signage, incense, and oils, acting as a historical storehouse for South Central’s material culture. The following year, Halsey’s first solo exhibition in Europe, Too Blessed 2 be Stressed! at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, featured an immersive environment of objects linking diasporic cultures from Los Angeles to Paris. In 2021, Halsey was commissioned by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, to produce a series of banners combining contemporary images from her neighborhood with ancient Egyptian and Nubian works from the museum’s collection. In 2023, Halsey built a site-specific installation commissioned for the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Titled the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I) , the glass fiber–reinforced concrete structure is inspired by the Temple of Dendur and other artifacts from the museum’s collections. Incised on its walls are portrait heads of the artist’s contemporaries, with words and images that reference her neighborhood. Sculptural sphinxes and Hathor columns adorned with faces of Halsey’s community and family, including her mother, Glenda, and her partner, Monique, function as guardians. An emblem of personal and communal expression, the monument draws from the distant past, addresses the vitality of the present, and proposes a vision of the future. In 2024, Emajendat —Halsey’s first solo museum exhibition in the United Kingdom—opened at Serpentine, London, transforming the gallery space into an immersive “funk garden” of technicolor sand dunes and a life-size diorama. In 2026, the artist’s sculpture park, sister dreamer, lauren halsey’s architectural ode to tha surge n splurge of south central los angeles , will open to the public in South Central, featuring monumental sculptures, gardens, and extensive public programming. In 2019, Halsey founded Summaeverythang Community Center, an organization dedicated to addressing disparities in access to educational resources, economic opportunities, and recreational spaces experienced by community members in South Central Los Angeles. Having helped to alleviate the food insecurity crisis during the COVID-19 pandemic, Summaeverythang now organizes educational programs, job training initiatives, and events that celebrate and preserve the neighborhood’s cultural heritage. A permanent structure for the center is being designed by architect Barbara Bestor, with plans to open in 2028.